”Six Ordinary Stories” by Syrian director Meyar Al Roumi is a quite refreshing report on six ordinary taxi drivers and their work and life in Damascus. Ordinary, well also extraordinarily open they are as well as critical to the life that is offered to them. One has a double job as a fireman and a taxi driver in order to earn enough, another used to have a shawarma shop, be a creative person, a chef, whereas now he is not really appreciated, because ”anyone can drive a car”. A third one is a religious person, who drove a taxi also during his studies and now aims to be an imam… The taxi-driver-format is well known, and maybe the film is not to be considered a creative documentary, but a courageous one and funny it is in a country with censorship. The conclusion of this film: Life in Damascus, Syria is tough with low salaries for looong working days.

No female drivers of course, nothing about women in this film, but two other documentaries made up for that through a strong focus on women in the Arab countries. ”Women without Shadow” by Saudi Haifaa Al-Mansour, said to be the first female filmmaker in Saudi Arabia, is shocking to watch with its filming and interviews of women totally covered, either protesting against the position of women in the society or saying that this is how it is. This film is from 2005, the other one to be mentioned is ”In my Father’s House” by Dutch living Fatima Jebli Ouazzani, from 1997, awarded many times for its touching story about a woman (the director), who has not seen her father for 16 years because she did not marry according to Maroccan wedding rituals and rules, including being a virgin when she married. We attend a Dutch-Moroccan couple who marries in Marocco, we see wonderful scenes with Fatima and her grandparents, we see a small girl running after her father in the small streets of her childhood, and we hear the tragic story about her mother who passed away after having been left by a father, who took a new wife. The mix of documentary and fiction scenes are beautifully done, the film is an early demonstration of the docu-fiction that is so common today.

We take a taxi back to the hotel flying back tonite to Copenhagen with one day left of a very succesful festival. Thanks.  

www.dox-box.org

Another fine new initiative from DoxBox 2009 is the “Point of View” festival newsletter. Editor-in-chief is Danish Ulla Jacobsen, who by this year decided to leave the post of the DOX Magazine after more than a decade as the brilliant editor of (my biased opinion as former director of EDN, the organisation behind DOX) this best independent documentary film cultural publication. Ulla Jacobsen now works free lance as a journalist and video photographer. Here follows a clip from her intro to the “Point of View”:

… the intention is to create a space for reflection on and debate about the films that will be shown at the festival and the subjects they deal with. Each day a new edition will be published that will include reviews of the films at the festival, interviews with the filmmakers, reports from the corridors and highlights of the programme. One of the pages in the bulletin will be reserved for the side programme titled “Voices of Women” as this bulletin will also have a special focus on gender issues.

The bulletin is written by 9 young women from Syria, Morocco, Jordan and Denmark – and it also a product of a workshop that takes place during the festival which is training the nine participants to write about cinema and gender issues, and more specifically about documentary films and how gender issues are represented in this film genre…

The results can be read on

http://www.dox-box.org/

The writing workshop is over. An amazing development from Day 1 to Day 3. 5 documentary projects are ready to be piitched internationally. Projects with quality and passion. The doors should be opened for these filmmakers to proceed to the European pitch fora and markets:

“The Virgin Mary, the Copts and me” by Namir Abdel Messeh from France/Egypt, a young director who wants to travel back to his homeland, where his father was jailed during the Nasser time, and his Coptian relatives consider him, a non-believer, with both scepticism and love. “Take me Back to Sydney” by Louly Seif from Egypt, an intriguing project about gender identity from a director, who at the age of 16 years wanted to have her hair cut short as a boy. It turns out that her grandfather was one of the first to make transexual operations in Sydney. The director goes back to meet a drag queen, one of the patients of the grandfather. Elias Moubarak from Lebanon has access to children in a refugee camp (the film has no title yet), where he has been as an aid worker. He has great characters: “Hamada, George, Junior, Evel, Hiba are children refugees, asylum seekers or migrants living in an unstable country: Lebanon.” Dalia Fathallah, from Lebanon as well, calls her project “Little Sunshines” with the subtitle “redheads from Lebanon”, a quite unusual hair colour for this region. She sets out to meet others with the same “handicap” to produce a film, that ” will be light and humorous, even if dealing underneath with deep issues”. Finally, maybe the most courageous of the film projects, “Those Days” – Noha El Meadawy from  Egypt wants to make a film that starts from her strong experience of fiiling a case against corruption in Egyptian television finding herself abandoned by people who before supported her. She loses the case and wants to integrate her story into the tragic story of two women from the 70’es. Photo from Dalia Fathallah’s previous film “Mabrouk at Fahrir”.

If you want two page descriptions of these film projects, you can contact:

http://www.dox-box.org/

Second day of a workshop organised by DoxBox that really has put an emphasis on establishing a so-called industry section of the two year old festival. Mikael Opstrup and I tutor 6 filmmakers with projects and 6 with no projects. The projects have been selected by the organisation – there are people from Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. Most of the film proposals have a very personal starting point, very European I would say, the author driven film tradition, auteur tradition, thank you Truffaut and Godard, high quality, but little money to be found in this region. Most of them have been abroad, two live abroad, and they have collected some funding from foreign sources.

To generalise: The reason to support them and not the Europeans who come here for a couple of weeks or months to shoot their documentaries… they know their world much better, they live here, they have personal experiences and so on. It sounds banal, so why are there not more Arab documentaries shown in Europe. One thing is of course lack of knowledge from our side, and promotion from the part of the region, this is what DoxBox rightfully is working on, the other is that we ask for producers to be involved when we open for calls for the EDN development and pitching sessions, and the training sessions supported by the EU MEDIA Programme.

But we dont have producers in this region, they say, and those we have are not good enough. We can make everything by ourselves. Build teams from your own generation are our easy answers, easier said than done, but the only way. Workshop is over tomorrow monday, 6 two page project descriptions will be ready to be presented the days after, to invited funders and filmmakers. More about that later. Photo: Loyly Sief, Egypt.

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Nicholas Philibert is here. Three films have been shown, “Le Pays des Sourds”, “Retour en Normandie” and “La moindre des choses”. Last year the Syrian audience could enjoy “Etre et Avoir”. Philibert did a master class, denied to be called a master, talked for two hours with a lot of charm and commitment, especially about “La moindre des choses”, which is for sure a Master’s Piece. Shot in 1995, the director went to the psychiatric clinic called la Borde, filmed the people in the institution, staff and patients, and followed the rehearsals and staging of a theatre piece by Polish Witold Gombrowicz. What comes out of it is a beautiful hymn to life and to us, the actors on the big stage of life. Wonderful characters with whom Philibert made a film, as he said, the film is not about but with. A director’s vision and what I admire in this film is the almost caressing rythm of the montage, with which Philibert slowly introduces his gallery of characters.

Constantly looking for beauty… my work consists of creating the conditions for something to happen, he said, this great filmmaker, who masters the art of listnening to the other. I am a documentarian and not a fiction filmmaker, I do not want people to play roles. Maybe I ask them to repeat something or ask if I can be present on a special occasion but they are themselves.

www.dox-box.org

It is sometimes difficult to understand the mechanisms of censorship. I saw the funny, maybe a bit repetitive documentary by Massoud Bakhshi, “Tehran has no more Pomegranates”, a playful and well made film about the big city, using wonderful archive, quite critical to the society in a soft ironic tone. I was told that the film has been screened in the national festival, and won a prize. When I was inTehran in 2000 several films were on the shelf forbidden for the local audience. But being shown abroad at whatever festival. So are times-a-changing? Or did the rulers just see that documentaries are not that dangerous?

Orwa Nyrabia, festival director at DoxBox, told me that there are many critical films shown in Iran, paradoxically some of these films can not be shown here in Damascus as the censors here do not want to annoy their allies in Iran!

Full house for this film, lots of laughter, always good to see humorous documentaries, is it not?

http://www.dox-box.org/

It is one of those minimalistic films that subject-wise has been seen so many times: Man lives alone outside the cities, big house, animals – cows, chicken, horses, cats and dogs – he has retired from the noisy world full of pollution and he has a fine life. A bit excentric, yes, but clever and sweet to the filmmaker, his nephew, the Lebanese film director Simon El Habre, who masters a narrative full of warmth and surprises with the behind the camera nephew getting closer and closer to his uncle and his story. And why are you not married, have you ever been in love, what happened to your parents… questions are asked, the uncle demonstrates his passion for the animals, gets into his old, rusty car to go downhill with the milk, and slowly we understand that the village is emptied because of what happened in the civil war in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990. The film has an extraordinary sound design and you are not bored for a moment. It was in Berlin, it goes to Nyon and Hotdocs, well-deserved. Tell your local festival to screen it.

Here in Damascus the audience enjoyed the film with big applause. What an uncle to have! Charismatic, energetic, with a smile in his eyes all the time, a happy man.

http://www.dox-box.org/

Orwa Nyrabia, together with Diana el-Jeiroudi the founder and director of the festival:

We considered 300 films. 90 of them we requested for the selection. 100 passed for the selection committee, 6 people, and out came the around 40 films that we show… a very democratic selection process in a country that can not be characterised as democratic!… was my comment.

But we (Nyrabia and el-Jeroudi) did the side bars, the two series called “Voices of Women” and “Voices of War”. It is a festival for the audience, there is no other international documentary festival in the region, so we have no competition, Nyrabia says, this is why we do not refrain from showing films, that are not completely new. Great films that our audience has never seen before.

Which gives me the chance to re-watch the 1991 masterpiece by Polish director Maciej Drygas, “Hear My Cry” (photo) about Richard Siwiec, who in 1968 set fire to himself in protest against “the evil of tyranny, hate and lies possessing the world”. As well as three films by Nicholas Philibert and others. Check the site of DoxBox.

http://www.dox-box.org/

Second edition. Second time that Damascus has an international documentary film festival. The programme is enlarged, there is an industry section, sidebar retrospectives, it is all there. Impressive it is to be back.

Full house at the opening film, “China is still Far” by Malek Bensmaïl, shot in Algeria and dealing with the question of what it means to be Algerian. Let me give the floor to the director: ” A school somewhere in the Aurés. Between the North and the South. Between an oasis and the steppe.I decided to set up my camera in a classroom of the last form of a primary school for a few months so that I could seize, through the look of the children as well as through that of their teachers and families, what has been passed on in an Algerian school, 50 years after the independence…”

It is beautifully shot, the children and their teachers are great, there are some very touching and funny moments between them, other sequences do not have the same focus and intensity, is felt to be a bit too long, but a very relevant choice for the opening of the festival.

http://www.dox-box.org/